The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell.
The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors.
Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but because the article doesn't properly establish why.
The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that.
I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact, these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars").
And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles.
Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays!
My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars.
The notability guideline supports the non-negotiable verifiability principle. In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content. With that, the amount of blatantly false content. The burden of weeding out that content falls on people who could otherwise be improving articles on subjects of note.
I think something people miss about WP is the fact that, at the end of the day, all the articles on this massive free volunteer project are published under an encyclopedia's masthead. It really is an actual encyclopedia. It's not the Internet. If something survives in WP, it's supposed to be good. The project is fundamentally opposed to bogus articles; in fact, the project is about not having bogus articles.
Unfortunately "improving articles on subjects of note" (as well as arguing notability) requires more contentious editing/lawyering compared to "developing new articles on marginal topics". The lawyering is exciting for one kind of old-hand contributor -- but turns off many others.
So optimizing for "improving articles on subjects of note" may paradoxically serve to make total editor attention more scarce, and waste more of it on low-value disputes and incremental refinements. "Why bother," a newbie or loosely-attached casual contributor might ask, "when all these busybodies keep marking subjects of interest to me for deletion, and mangling prose with obsessive footnotes (or requests for same)?"
!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
At what cost are you prepared to hold the "no bogus articles" line?
Some of the deletionists are very far into 'burning the village in order to save it' territory. I.e., they're so obsessed over "quality" that they'll snuff out anything that might even be the slightest bit questionable, erring on the side of removing things.
That strikes me as stupid and needlessly destructive. If bogus articles creep in, the solution is to correct them and move on.
The obsession over Wikipedia's "reputation" is likewise misguided. Unless the entire concept of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" is abandoned, it's never going to be a totally reliable source, and users will always have to be cautioned to fact-check before depending on the information. Outside of the Wikipedia community, this is pretty much taken for granted.
The best compromise solution I can come up with would be to periodically 'fork' the WP articlebase, and let the deletionists go to town on the fork, honing it down into some subset of the working version, which users could then choose to browse if they wanted something with a slightly higher barrier to entry. However, my guess is that very few casual WP users actually care.
I don't think your logic holds. The fact that it's "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is why deletionism is a healthy force. If the deletionists let up, and WP spiraled out of control with vanity articles, it would likely stop being an encyclopedia anyone can edit.
Again, I think people personalize this. The good deletionists don't care about you or your subject. It's the project they're sticking up for, not the non-notability of Trevor Blackwell. When the topic of debate is Trevor Blackwell, they'll lose. When it's Ketchup_salt, they'll win.
There certainly are bad deletionists. A lot of them. But I don't think that's a symptom of deletionism. I think it's a symptom of editing-as-sport and status-seeking, and that those are the problems that are really poisoning WP.
Deletionism nudges the project power more towards those with "editing-as-sport and status-seeking" motivations. Procedural games are what they like.
For new and casual contributors, deletionism forces them to engage on topics they aren't passionate about -- older topics and wikipedia lawyering -- rather than the marginal topics they're excited to get started (and which may become rigorously 'notable' in due time). Some of these people will just be driven away.
'Orthogonal' is the strong claim I'm disputing; other WP process does not create the same problem. For example, editing someone's contribution to improve its voice/NPOV or suggest verification can encourage casual contributors; it's positive attention. "I got something started, others are paying attention, progress is occurring. Fun!"
Deletionism -- whether the judgment that something should be deleted or following through with deletion -- is negative attention. It uniquely discourages contributors and often destroys content of small-but-positive value. (For example, it destroys the important 'first drafts' of topics that will someday easily pass 'notability'.)
Deletionism also shrinks the territory on which collaboration can occur. A deleted article can be neither corrected nor improved; it is a void. Perhaps there is someone somewhere who could add the citations... justify the importance... benefit from the partial information -- but deletion forecloses that possibility, even though cheap storage and cheap search means incomplete scraps of information can better find their audience/editors than ever before.
"In the absence of WP:N, the amount of random content on WP rises. With it, the amount of difficult-to-verify content."
Absolutely not. The difference would be as follows.
With the notability guideline, ten million monkeys bang on their keyboard:
"Delete, NN"
"Delete, NN"
"Delete, NN"
"Delete, NN"
etc.
Without the notability guideline, the same ten million monkeys who are already reviewing these articles at least enough to type a brief vote in a discussion will bang out:
"Delete, not verifiable."
"Delete, not verifiable."
"Delete, not verifiable."
"Delete, not verifiable."
While the latter requires more keystrokes (and thus in aggregate represents significantly more effort on the part of the monkeys), it is otherwise not distinguishable in purpose or effect from the former. At least, it isn't distinguishable so long as WP:N is only used for articles which cannot be verified by referring to reliable sources (hint: that's a bad assumption to make).
That argument isn't just false, it's prima facie false.
In the WP:V case, some articles are stricken for being nonverifiable. Others are kept despite being nonnotable.
Wikipedia is now charged with the task of maintaining and article about Thomas Ptacek. That article is fine right after the AfD, of course. But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out.
That overhead doesn't exist in the WP:N encyclopedia we have today, because a Thomas Ptacek article wouldn't survive AfD for notability reasons.
"But 3 months later, it claims that Thomas Ptacek is the inventor of ketchup salt. Some WP volunteer has to catch that and scrub it out."
And with the notability criterion, lots of WP volunteers have to spend lots of time trawling AfD and typing "Delete, NN" over and over and over again. Meanwhile, unverifiable information pops up and must be removed from articles about notable subjects just as much as non-notable subjects.
So how, precisely, does Wikipedia save effort under this plan?
Or, more accurately, why do you believe that more effort is involved in:
"Nominated for deletion due to: not verifiable/does not cite sources"
than in:
"Nominated for deletion due to: not notable/does not assert notability"
In both cases, research must be done by multiple volunteers to assess the claim and come to a decision. But in one case the criterion is relatively objective; in the other it's an invitation to highly-subjective flamewars.
Because WP:N cordons off a whole huge swath of human knowledge and says WP doesn't have to bother keeping articles about it accurate; it can just be removed wholesale from the encyclopedia.
WP says, Pokemon yes, Thomas Ptacek no. Pikachu must be yellow, not green, but it doesn't matter if Thomas Ptacek invented ketchup salt, because WP doesn't have to cover it.
I feel like you're kind of having to go through contortions to avoid this fact, James.
I just don't really understand why another redundant label -- "not notable" -- is needed to express the underlying concept of "not verifiable".
With only a couple of narrow exceptions, lack of notability is not sufficient for speedy deletion by an administrator, which means that all those articles still take up time and consume the effort of editors who participate in the AfD. In other words, I doubt that there's enough of a saving of time and effort to justify the myriad other problems the notability criterion is known to generate.
And so it seems to me that it'd be far simpler to do away with the notability guideline and keep the focus on what it allegedly aims to accomplish: ensuring that information in Wikipedia can be verified by reference to reliable sources. If an article cites no sources to back up the information it presents, get rid of it unless/until someone comes up with suitable sources, and throw the politics and the popularity contests out of the process.
If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted.
How long does an article have to correct itself before the deletionists have their way with it? It seems to me that when plenty of reasonable people agree that someone is notable, and the problem is external links vs. reference citations, the {{Notability}} tag isn't the best way to highlight this and in fact is distracting in a destructive way.
Then why not remove the warning saying "this article is likely to be merged or deleted"?
"Does not meet notability guidelines, please help fix" is not the same as "Does not meet notability guidelines, help fix or this article gets deleted." The latter frames the issue as content not permitted, the former frames the issue as content yet to come. The difference is significant.
The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors.
Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but because the article doesn't properly establish why.
The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that.